Archive for the 'Competitive Intelligence' Category

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Finding the Franchise Owner

Published on July 16, 2008 in Canada, Company Research and Competitive Intelligence. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Franchises identify themselves in the marketplace by using a common name and trademark. Each user of the name purchases a franchise which allows the franchisee the right to use the name. This is where the fun begins.

The franchisee will be a company or partnership with rights to use the name. In Canada, the right to use the name will normally be filed as a Business Name Registration. This allows a person, company, or partnership to operate under a name other than his or its proper name.

Now imagine you have a franchise at 123 Main Street in some Ontario town or city. How do you distinguish it from all the other franchises using the same business name?

In Ontario, OnCorp will allow you to view a list of all the business name registrations along with the recorded addresses.

A mouse click in the check-box next to the registration with the correct address will get you the Business Name Registration, and that will tell you the name of the company or partnership that owns that franchise location.

Ruthless Numerical Evaluation of Web Data Sources

Published on July 15, 2008 in Competitive Intelligence and Search Strategies. 0 Comments Tags: , .

As I surf,  Alexa Sparky provides each site’s traffic rank and a historical chart of traffic in the bottom right-hand corner. This is useful for evaluating the reliability of the data on the site. This tool helps evaluate sources without being influenced by elaborate Web site designs.

Of course Alexa Sparky is far from perfect, it does not provide a full ranking, but it can help you identify better content. For instance, a site that is ranked in the mid-six-figure range has a large following. A site like Danger Room with a mid-three-figure ranking has an enormous following, larger that many newspapers and newsstand magazines.

French Competitive Intelligence Club

Published on July 11, 2008 in Competitive Intelligence. 0 Comments Tags: .

I first noticed this on the SCIP news site.

Competitive Intelligence Club Spreads its Wings
June 30, 2008

Initially a network of competitive intelligence specialists working in France’s aeronautics industry, the Commission pour l’Information en Entreprises (ClpE) gradually expanding its remit to new areas like lobbying, security and crisis management. Bolted on to the Association Aeronautique et Astronautique de France (3AF), CIpE boasts a membership of 80 officials in charge of business intelligence in around 40 big French companies and organizations.

Incompetence and Non-compliance to the Rescue

Published on July 10, 2008 in Competitive Intelligence, Privacy and Private Investigator. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

An interesting  study that found that 87% of data breaches are the result of incompetence and carelessness.

Another study shows that a large disconnect between the executives tasked with protecting customer data and marketing departments, which use the data for advertising purposes or share it with third parties.

a third of marketing execs said they don’t place any limits on the data they share with third parties, such as e-mail marketing agencies or online advertisers. By contrast, 75% of privacy officers believe that their companies limit the sharing of customer data.

These findings are a good reminder that asking questions will yield useful data that they shouldn’t divulge. It’s all in how you ask the question.

Surveillance as a Legitimate Competitive Intelligence Tool

Published on July 3, 2008 in Competitive Intelligence. 0 Comments Tags: .

A survey in Britain and the United States found that eavesdropping in public places was common. Nearly two out of five British professionals (35 per cent) and 34 per cent of Americans surveyed said they had caught sight of other people’s sensitive company documents.

Information exchanged during supposedly private business conversations were also used by others for their own advantage, according to survey findings.

The survey, TWO THIRDS OF TRAVELLING BRITS HEAR CONFIDENTIAL BUSINESS INFORMATION LEAKED BY FRAZZLED BLACKBERRY GENERATION, has an obvious bias. Regus Group plc, the company that commissioned the survey, sells virtual offices, and meeting rooms to clients on a contract basis. Regus caters to small businesses, large companies with few representatives in a given location, and frequent travellers. However, the results seem to match my experience regarding the behaviour of many business people.

If you conduct business in inappropriate places, then expect somebody to listen in on what is transpiring. If you work on company documents in public, then expect somebody to look over your shoulder. Conducting business in public makes surveillance of your activities legal and ethical. If the guy sitting at the next table in a restaurant reports to a competitor what he sees and hears during your business meeting, don’t complain, you gave away the information, and a competitor will use it to advantage.

Dumpster-diving in the Digital Age

Published on July 2, 2008 in Competitive Intelligence, Industrial Espionage and Security. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Dumpster-diving — going through trash bins in hopes of finding paper records with valuable information like customer names or future product plans — is alive and well in the age of USB flash drives and portable music players.

An excellent article from Robert L. Scheier in Computerworld, on Monday, December 17, 2007 entitled, Dumpster-diving for e-data, discusses the risk factors and offers some solutions.

Popular Mechanics offers advice on how to destroy hard drives.

Competitive Intelligence, French Style

Published on June 27, 2008 in Competitive Intelligence. 0 Comments Tags: .

The French have a reputation for aggressive intelligence operations to support their economic and industrial needs. They are acting in their own interests, as Charles de Gaulle said, “The French do not have friends. We French have interests.” . Their actions have a historical precedent as you can see from some of the previous articles about the French during the Industrial Revolution.  A review of recent history further explains the French approach to Competitive Intelligence.

Continue reading ‘Competitive Intelligence, French Style’

Finding Employees with Google

Published on June 25, 2008 in Competitive Intelligence and Search Strategies. 0 Comments Tags: , .

If you need to interview current or former employees of a company for competitive intelligence or investigative purposes, then Google is the first resource to consult.

This simple search will help you find employees of a given company:

Acme Company “employed by” OR “work for”

This might be tedious to sort through the results as ” work for” may turn up a lot of irrelevant hits. Try this with IBM as the company name and you will see what I mean.

To find references to a person’s employment try this:

“john smith” “employed by” OR “work for”

With either of these searches you might want to add a country, province, or city to limit the number of hits returned.

Spread FUD Not Propaganda

Published on June 20, 2008 in Communication, Competitive Intelligence, News Media and Reputation Management. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

An excellent article at Knowledge Is Power about using a blog to spread FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) about competitors and manage the spin on news about its rivals while usually reporting positively about your own employer.

Another post about Black PR defines this as distinct from a disinformation campaign.

Secrets are Secret, unless you work in the UK Cabinet Office

Published on June 19, 2008 in Competitive Intelligence, Industrial Espionage, Intellectual Property Rights and Intelligence Services. 4 Comments Tags: , , , .

By now you have heard of the secret intelligence files left on a commuter train in England.

Keith Vaz MP, chairman of the powerful Home Affairs select committee told the BBC: “Such confidential documents should be locked away…they should not be read on trains.”

This should be a reminder to the private sector regarding trade secrets.

Trade Secrets

A trade secret is not protected by a Patent, Trademark, or Industrial Design. A trade secret is confidential and proprietary information that you protect because of its commercial value and the competitive advantage that it produces for your company.

Competitive Intelligence

Exposing a trade secret in public by working on a critical document on an airplane, leaving a trade secret on a commuter train, or exposing it in an proposal, may eliminate the confidential nature of the data, and once you do that, you have, by definition, given up protecting it, therefore, it is not a trade secret that you can claim as proprietary — your former trade secret moves into the public domain for all to see and use.

As a competitive intelligence practitioner, I often find former trade secrets loose in the public domain due to irresponsible security practices. If the owner does not protect the trade secret, it ceases to be confidential and proprietary data, and is likely to become somebody else’s competitive advantage, or worse still, it might become a standard practice for an entire industry.

Falling Victim to Competitive Intelligence

Published on June 16, 2008 in Competitive Intelligence. 1 Comment Tags: .

Avoid Undue Diligence like the Plague

June 2, 2008

Due diligence is the verification of information given to an investor by a startup in contemplation of a potential investment. Undue diligence, the solicitation of information for competitive reasons…

You are more likely to fall victim to the services of a competitive intelligence expert…

Don’t respond to RFPs unless you are in a commodity business…

This article illustrates how the simple approaches to gathering competitive intelligence data often lead to success even when the target is suspicious of your intent. Sour-grapes and self-pity are no substitute for vigilance and competence. The author of this article did not understand what constitutes a trade secret and a competitive advantage.

Don’t be Sloppy with Metadata or You’ll Get This

Published on June 13, 2008 in Company Research, Competitive Intelligence, Due Diligence, Private Investigator and Report Writing. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Kroll’s sleuths are more Clouseau than Columbo

Inspector Clouseau is alive and well, and he works for Kroll Associates, the corporate spies who are supposed to specialise in finding, and keeping, company secrets.

…in fact, it is so boring that after downloading it I took to reading the ‘metadata’ concealed with the electronic document that tells you who wrote the report, why and when.The results were considerably more interesting than you might imagine. The report’s ‘properties’ field listed three Texas-based oil and gas exploration companies and the names of seven men – none of which has anything to do with the North Carolina Highway Patrol. What is more, the subject line mentioned the term ‘due diligence investigation’, which is corporatespeak for the type of inquiry often carried out by firms like Kroll when a company is considering a takeover.

Finding Corporate Owned Internet Domains

Published on June 6, 2008 in Company Research, Competitive Intelligence, Search Engines, Search Strategies and Sources. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

I was recently asked how to find the domains owned by a particular company. Here is what I recently unearthed on this topic.

Whois

You can still search RIPE (Regional Internet Registry for Europe), which contains registrations for most of the European countries. The US server at InterNic no longer allows this.

Databases

Domain Names database on Dialog includes information on registered domain names with Top Level Domains (TLD) of COM, NET, ORG, BIZ, and INFO as well as those that use country codes, e.g., AT. it can be searched by owner name. This database was last updated in September 2004.

DomainTools offers a rather expensive solution which is like an updated version of the Domain Names database. According to their web site:

…currently indexes all domains in the .COM, .NET, .ORG, .INFO, .BIZ, and .US TLDs. That is 103,042,578 domains as of today. In addition to indexing every active domain, it also knows about the 334,835,604 inactive domains that have been registered and deleted since the early days of the Internet. Great names are deleted daily so it is important that we keep track of them.

The partial word searching ability of Name Intelligence is unmatched by any other engine. We allow more options and faster results then anything else on the market and we continue to add new functionality monthly. In an information world a company can only focus on so many problems at one time. We dedicate our time to making domain searching faster and more efficient so our partners can dedicate their time to their own core technologies.

Every month Name Intelligence actively probes every domain name in its search engine to figure out the domain’s status. Our search results not only reflect active and deleted domains but domains with websites or not. We have taken searching for domains very seriously.

… DomainTools has leveraged the power of its Registrant Search engine to provide notifications whenever a person or company registers a new domain, has one transfered to them, or transfers a domain out of their control.

They report on two Richard McEachin names for $57. When I search on Scarborough, the city for the registrant address, it finds two records for one domain for $57. When I add Canada as a limiter, they says they have no reports.

Searching the name McEachin returned 248 records in 147 domains and a report cost of $147. When I add Canada as a limiter, they again say they have no reports. When I search on Scarborough, the city for the registrant address, it finds four records for one domain for $61.

Not exactly what I call a stellar performance.

Proxy Registrations

Many domain registrants are now are concealed by registrars such as Domains by Proxy.

Inter-Corporate Onwership Searching III

Published on May 30, 2008 in Canada, Company Research, Competitive Intelligence and Due Diligence. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

The Inter-Corporate Ownership data produced by Statistics Canada contains information on the structures of Canadian enterprises. It provides the names of all holding and held companies (both domestic and foreign) in Canada and their respective ownership percentages.

The information is collected by Statistics Canada under the Corporations and Labour Unions Returns Act (CALURA) and is supplemented with information from international publications. In 1998 the act was amended to remove the labour unions component (Part II), leaving Part I of the Act unchanged. The revised Act, named the Corporations Returns Act, is equivalent to CALURA part I.

All the reporting companies must have gross revenues of at least 15 million dollars or assets exceeding 10 million dollars.

The updated data is reported quarterly. This data is the most accurate, timely, and complete data on inter-corporate ownership in Canada. It also provides detailed information of multi-national enterprises that have some component in Canada.


Inter-Corporate Ownership Searching II

Published on May 23, 2008 in Canada, Company Research, Competitive Intelligence, Due Diligence and U.S.A.. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Corporate Affiliations

The Corporate Affiliations database appears on LexisNexis and Dialog. It can also be purchased as directories and on CD. According to the Dialog Bluesheet, it covers about 184,000 U.S. and non-U.S. companies. This includes private and public companies, both parents and their subsidiaries and major divisions. All major U.S. domestic and international stock exchange listed companies are included. U.S. privately held companies must have reported annual sales in excess of $10 million and foreign privately held companies must have reported annual sales in excess of $50 million to be included in the database. Each record includes the executive names, director names, corporate family hierarchy. Net worth, total assets, and total liabilities sometimes appear in the record.

I have never found this resource particularly useful because it has a high threshold for inclusion of companies. It is also US-centric. It shines for researching large enterprises with a large component in the U.S.A..